Final Fantasy VII Remake Opening Movie. That's It. That's the Headline

Immediately following yesterday’s new batch of Final Fantasy VII Remake screenshots, Square Enix decided to give everyone a Valentine’s Day gift and release the full opening cinematic for the game. The Final Fantasy VII Remake opening movie is just under five and a half minutes long. with plenty of new scenes of Midgar and the wasteland around the city before getting to the iconic assault on Sector 1’s reactor. In comparison, the original Final Fantasy VII’s opening cinematic was only about 1:40 before players took control of Cloud. Watch the full Final Fantasy VII Remake intro cinematic below:

Final Fantasy VII Remake Opening Movie

The cinematic begins with a sweeping shot of the lifeless wastelands surrounding Midgar. We then move into the city itself, a bustling and detailed metropolis. The tightly packed slums hum with life, people making the best of their situations. Children ride their bikes through the streets and play on the iconic Sector 6 playground that borders Sector 7. As night falls, the green glow of Mako erupts from the top of the Shin-Ra building in the center of the city. In the flickering green embers, we finally move into the opening we’re familiar with from the original game: Aerith the flower girl, sweeping shots of Midgar at night, the train coming into the station of the Sector 1 reactor, and AVALANCHE all hopping off the train.

The latter half of the Final Fantasy VII Remake opening movie leaked last year as part of the long-rumored but never released Final Fantasy VII Remake demo. The additional establishing shots in the official cinematic help viewers understand the city of Midgar a little bit better. It’s in the center of a barren wasteland, Shin-Ra’s mining of Mako sucking all the life from that portion of the planet. Once we get into the city itself, we get a better understanding of the citizens and the tight quarters in which they live, work, and play. There’s an additional shot of a plant in the city dying.

It also sets up for greater impact at the time of the inevitable Sector 7 plate collapse, when countless citizens of Midgar die. (Midgar is built on two levels, the upper plates for the wealthier citizens and the lower slums.) In the original game, innocent lives are also lost when AVALANCHE (the resistance group led by Barret Wallace) blows up the Sector 1 reactor in the game’s opening. Some rumors say that the Remake’s narrative has been reworked so that AVALANCHE simply disables the reactor instead of blowing it up and causing that collateral damage.

Check out Final Fantasy VII Remake’s Deluxe Edition, Preorder to get a Sephiroth PS4 theme

With just under two months to go until release, Square Enix has been on a roll showing off new materials from Final Fantasy VII Remake. Last month, a trailer released featuring the game’s new theme song, Hollow, and also gave us a much more detailed look at a number of iconic scenes and characters.